On the Infinite Memory Banks
I have not written much on this website recently. As I scan the internet these days, and come to terms with the extent to which everything that is ever written, has ever been written, will ever be written, and can ever be stolen and regurgitated in plagiarized form by a property-obliterating computer technology that short-sighted people today are all imagining will be both the death of human art and the birth of a transhumanist utopia, I feel like the narrator Borges felt at the end of his long night with Ireneo Funes, the young man afflicted with an infinite and insuperable memory, in “Funes the Memorious.” As Borges finally realizes, Funes’ miraculous talent leaves him fundamentally incapable of forming a thought — thought being the product of universalization and abstraction, functions which a mind forever engrossed in an endlessly expanding array of particularized details can never perform — and is therefore living in a tortured non-reality of sense data devoid of order or meaning. Reflecting on Funes’ condition, which is in fact a plight and an abyss, Borges, rising to leave as the dawn’s light enters the room, feels himself supremely aware of needing to move as economically and undisturbingly as possible, so as not to add any further pointless detail to the poor young man’s empty sensory satiation.
Feeling much the same way (though without the compassion) in the face of today’s online infinity of mindless particularity masquerading as comprehensive reality, I instinctively return to Borges’ great description of his delicate stealth in leaving Funes’ room: “I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying useless gestures.”
Orwell conceived of the memory hole, into which the office workers of a dystopian banality systematically toss all ideas and historical realities that have been deemed non-compliant with the mandated truths of the present, so that non-compliant facts and thoughts are not merely marginalized or consigned to private conversations — the natural and inevitable conditon of all thoughtful independence — but removed from all possible notice or examination forever. Does not today’s ubiquitous and universal inundation of every mind with everything that can possibly be thrown at it, without differentiation or any standard of rank (apart from the filter of political-corporate algorithms) achieve the same result as the memory hole, but in an even more ingenious way, namely under the rubric of “memory” itself? Infinite storage capacity, the aptly named “cloud,” is both the practical manifestation and the perfect metaphor of an age that has confused input with learning, information (particular facts) with knowledge, sensation with experience, and instant access with its exact opposite, wisdom. This is Tocqueville’s soft despotism raised to the spiritual level, the gradual self-enslavement of the comfort-seeker woven into the subtlest fibers of the human soul. Nothing could be more final.
